Landscape Ecology of Alpine Environments

Dear Colleague,

Alpine environments – commonly defined as the landscape above the current treeline – are sentinels of global change. Warming two to three times faster than the global average, increasing temperatures exert probably the most striking impact on these (actually temperature-limited) ecosystems. Together with these climatic changes, however, also altered and/or intensified land use, invasive species, and increased nitrogen deposition, among other factors, are acting in concert to affect alpine ecosystems’ structure and functioning (like, e.g., biogeochemical cycles, species distribution and the resultant patterns of diversity) in a complex manner, pushing the entire alpine landscape into novel states.

At the same time, exactly these alpine environments – along with their adjacent mountain systems – provide important ecosystem services, like, e.g., water resources to nearly half of the world’s human population. Thus, the functional integrity of alpine and highland ecosystems becomes a key issue to us human beings. The maintenance of this integrity in face of the increasing pressure of global change calls for an effective and knowledge-based management and conservation. The inherent complexity, however, that arises from the multitude of factors involved in acting upon alpine ecosystems, challenges both the understanding of recent changes and, even more so, the assessment of future changes.

An approach that resolves, across a variety of spatio-temporal scales, the various interactions between the abiotic and biotic environment, deliberately including human activity, would be best suited to aid the necessary understanding. This is exactly what is at the heart of landscape ecology, a comparatively young branch of ecology that deals, as a multi-disciplinary science, with the interrelation between human society and its environment. A landscape ecology of alpine environments, focusing explicitly on those complex interactions that shape the landscape from the treeline and upwards, will contribute to the (policy-)relevant knowledge that is urgently needed to tackle the emerging environmental problems within these globally important areas.     

It is, thus, timely to dedicate a special issue of LAND to the landscape ecology of alpine areas that bundles leading-edge research about landscape functioning at high altitudes across the globe to provide a definitive statement about the state of the art and new insights. We welcome contributions from within and especially across disciplines that advance our understanding about the current functioning and future prospects of alpine landscapes, covering the whole field from observational studies to modelling approaches.

Dr. Roland Pape
Guest Editor

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• Ecosystem functioning
• Environment
• Climate change
• Land use and land cover change
• Coupled biogeographic/geomorphic processes
• Remote sensing and geospatial technologies
• Diversity
• Distribution modelling